The Year of
Hesitation

With European armies on the march, America seemed a world apart.

By

David M. Shribman

June 14, 2013 5:59 p.m. ET

It was the Year Before. The year before Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio would light up the baseball world with the numbers .406 and 56. The year before the Jeep was invented and the Manhattan Project was started, the year before Mount Rushmore was completed, the year before Joan Baez was born, the year before 2,402 victims of the attack on Pearl Harbor would die.

But 1940 was more than the Year Before. It was a time and era all its own: the Luftwaffe bombing assault on London, the assassination of Trotsky, the discovery of...